Tim Steller's column: It's time for Kari Lake to put up or shut up

Nobody in Arizona politics talks big the way Kari Lake talks big.

She trashes the news media, smashes the McCains, and bashes the “establishment” even now, six weeks after Election Day.

Her big talk is ironic, considering that she lost the election Nov. 8 that she should have won and is now resorting to a Hail Mary pass in a Maricopa County courtroom Wednesday and Thursday.

Lake’s loss, by 17,117 votes to Democrat Katie Hobbs, has seemingly bolstered her bluster. During a 50-minute speech at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix Sunday, Lake went on and on about the greatness of her “movement” and how the election was stolen from her and how the very future of the republic depends on her followers and her.

The Trump-style performance excites her core supporters, I’m sure, but grows tiresome to the broader Arizona public that voted against her in surprising numbers likely because of tirades like this.

“They corrupted our elections on Nov. 8, and they did it in broad daylight,” she said Sunday. “They couldn’t just do it in the dark of night because our movement is too massive.”

“They have built a house of cards here in Maricopa County,” she went on. “I’m not just going to knock that house of cards over. We’re going to burn it to the ground.”

So much bravado.

Now, though, Lake has a chance to back it up. On Tuesday evening, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson threw out eight of the 10 claims that Lake made in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the general election’s results. But he allowed two to stand and be tested in court.

It is a put up or shut up moment for Lake. Frankly, though, I don’t have much faith she will do either.

Thompson said two of Lake’s claims allege intentional misconduct by Maricopa County elections officials, and that they can’t be rejected at the present stage, a motion to dismiss the case, because of the nature of the claims. He made no evaluation of the evidence either way but said the evidence had to be heard.

Such was not the case with Lake’s eight other allegations. For example, Lake’s claim that the Secretary of State’s Office violated the First Amendment by reporting two tweets to a misinformation reporting system on Jan. 7, 2021.

Yes, her lawsuit depended in part on actions taken the day after Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob attacked the U.S. Capitol. That day, a staffer in the Secretary of State’s Office, C. Murphy Hebert, reported two tweets that, in Hebert’s words, “falsely assert that the Voter Registration System is owned and therefore operated by foreign actors.”

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The tweets were reported to the Center for Internet Security, which passed them on to Twitter, which took the tweets down. That’s it.

You can question the decision almost two years ago to report those tweets — I do, considering the tweets’ content and reach — but what’s more absurd is Lake claiming that was a reason for overturning the 2022 general election. Thompson, stifling laughter in his ruling, it seemed, said no — to that and other allegations.

Now, though, Lake comes to the real rub. Her attorneys are no longer alleging voter fraud in their elections. What they have to prove is outright theft of the election by people in Maricopa County’s election bureaucracy.

Maricopa County election officials definitely messed up on Election Day. An investigation by the online democracy-news organization VoteBeat found that the paper used by the county to print out ballots was too thick, leading to the printing being too dim for the tabulators to read.

Showing that they messed up will not be enough for Lake. As Thompson put it in his ruling, on one count, Lake’s attorneys “must show at trial that the BOD [Ballot-on-Demand] printer malfunctions were intentional, and directed to affect the results of the election, and that such actions did actually affect the outcome.”

None of those three steps will be easy.

On a separate count, Lake’s attorneys must do something similar: Show that county election officials deliberately broke laws and guidance on ballot chain-of-custody, and that this affected the outcome of the election. Again, a tough thing to prove in a race with a margin of 17,000 votes.

This isn’t the race for attorney general, with its miniscule margin of 511 votes that Republican Abraham Hamadeh is rightfully challenging. This is a much wider margin, too big for an automatic recount, that is easily explained by looking at how she tried to narrow her appeal, rather than broaden it, in the general-election campaign.

All the way up to Election Day, Lake was, with her customary bravado, telling supporters of Republican icon John McCain to “get the hell out” of a rally. She could have used them.

Of course, we know what will happen if Lake loses this week. She won’t blame herself. Even if she fails to put up the evidence, she will not shut up.

“I’m going to take my election lawsuit, which is the strongest election lawsuit this country has ever put forth, and I will take it to the Supreme Court if necessary,” she told the adoring crowd Sunday.

Yeah fine. But at some point she actually has to win. Otherwise, she can keep talking, but fewer and fewer people will be listening.